By Ayodeji Razaq, Co-founder and Group COO of The People Company Group (TPCG)

I’ve spent years building creative agencies, and one of the most unsettling things I’ve learned is this: teams often have no idea why their best work worked. I watched it happen in my own retrospective. A campaign had just landed well; client happy, crowd showed up, activation did its job, but three of my best people spent forty-five minutes arguing about what had made it a success.

One said the concept. One said the execution. Another said the weather, and honestly, maybe he had a point; Lagos weather has ended better plans than ours. I said nothing. Just sat there,  odded, and felt something creep up on me that I was not ready for: unease. Because I realised we had just spent forty-five minutes celebrating a win nobody could actually explain. We had no shared language for excellence, which meant we had no real language for failure either. And that, my friend, is a problem you do not want to discover on a good day.

I have built three agencies under one roof at The People Company: Riquesa handles brand activation and experiential, the kind of work where the consumer does not just encounter a product but feels it in a room, in a crowd, in a moment they did not expect. Duo operates in the digital and hybrid creative space, building campaigns that must earn attention in the most distracted media environment ever. Flipside handles communications and production, the work that shapes how a brand is understood and brought to life, from the narrative strategy down to the final execution. Three crafts, three different rhythms, one shared question that took us longer than it should have to answer properly: what does performance actually mean here, and how do you manage it without turning creative people into people who no longer want to create?

The question did not belong to us alone. I have watched brilliant founders make exactly this mistake. The moment performance needed to be named directly, they talked around it, called it trust, called it autonomy, called it “we are not that kind of agency” when what it actually was was fear, the fear that saying “this is not good enough” would break something fragile. So they kept things loose, and without anyone deciding it, the standard quietly became whatever the least accountable person in the room was willing to do. What that philosophy produces at scale is an environment where the standard is invisible, and when the standard is invisible, the people who are meeting it have no idea, and the people who are not meeting it have no reason to change. Everyone is operating in the dark and calling it freedom.

At Riquesa, running on time is the minimum. The real question is whether the consumer walked away different, whether the brand earned something in that room that advertising could not buy. At Duo, a campaign that performs on the numbers but says nothing new is still a failure by our internal measure. At Flipside, a story placed in the right publication at the right moment for the right reason is not luck. It is craft, and craft can be assessed. The moment you name these things explicitly, you stop managing feelings and start managing work.

What changed everything for us was separating performance management from punishment in the minds of our teams. For a long time, those two things were fused because the only time performance was discussed formally was when something had gone wrong. Every conversation arrived as a verdict. Nobody wants to be managed like that, and creative people especially will leave before they accept it. What we built instead was a culture where the conversation is continuous. Where feedback after a Riquesa campaign is not an event but a habit. Where a Duo strategist knows exactly where the gap is between their current thinking and what the work requires, not because someone told them at a review, but because it has been part of how we talk about the work all along.

The other thing worth saying, because it does not get said enough, is that performance management protects your best people more than it threatens them. The creatives who are genuinely exceptional are usually the ones most frustrated by environments with no standards, because they can see clearly what coasting looks like, and they resent carrying weight that is not theirs. Accountability done right is not a ceiling on creative people. It is what makes the environment worth staying in.

There is no version of building a serious creative business where you get to skip this. The People Company is still learning it, but the agencies winning long-term are not the ones with the loosest culture or the most inspiring mood boards. They are the ones where people know what excellence looks like, feel safe enough to fall short of it sometimes, and trust that the conversation about the gap will be honest and worth having. That is the culture worth protecting.